OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Using Genetic Algorithms to Simulate Evolution
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Evolution is the theory that plants and animals today have come from kinds that have existed in the past. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace dedicate their life to observe how species interact with their environment, grow, and change. We are able to predict future changes as well as simulate the process using genetic algorithms. Genetic Algorithms give us the opportunity to present multiple variables and parameters to an environment and change values to simulate different situations. By optimizing genetic algorithms to hold entities in an environment, we are able to assign varying characteristics such as speed, size, and cloning probability, to the entities to simulate real natural selection and evolution in a shorter period of time. Learning about how species grow and evolve allows us to find ways to improve technology, help animals going extinct to survive, and figure* out how diseases spread and possible ways of making an environment uninhabitable for them. Using data from an environment including genetic algorithms and parameters of speed, size, and cloning percentage, the ability to test several changes in the environment and observe how the species interacts within it appears. After testing different environments with a varied amount of food while keeping the number of starting population at 10 entities, it was found that an environment with a scarce amount of food was not sustainable for small and slow entities. All environments displayed an increase in speed, but the environments that were richer in food allowed for the entities to live for the entire duration of 50 generations, as well as allowed the population to grow significantly.
On the State of the Art in Authorship Attribution and Authorship Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Despite decades of research on authorship attribution (AA) and authorship verification (AV), inconsistent dataset splits/filtering and mismatched evaluation methods make it difficult to assess the state of the art. In this paper, we present a survey of the fields, resolve points of confusion, introduce Valla that standardizes and benchmarks AA/AV datasets and metrics, provide a large-scale empirical evaluation, and provide apples-to-apples comparisons between existing methods. We evaluate eight promising methods on fifteen datasets (including distribution-shifted challenge sets) and introduce a new large-scale dataset based on texts archived by Project Gutenberg. Surprisingly, we find that a traditional Ngram-based model performs best on 5 (of 7) AA tasks, achieving an average macro-accuracy of $76.50\%$ (compared to $66.71\%$ for a BERT-based model). However, on the two AA datasets with the greatest number of words per author, as well as on the AV datasets, BERT-based models perform best. While AV methods are easily applied to AA, they are seldom included as baselines in AA papers. We show that through the application of hard-negative mining, AV methods are competitive alternatives to AA methods. Valla and all experiment code can be found here: https://github.com/JacobTyo/Valla
Limit Cycles of AdaBoost
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The iterative weight update for the AdaBoost machine learning algorithm may be realized as a dynamical map on a probability simplex. When learning a low-dimensional data set this algorithm has a tendency towards cycling behavior, which is the topic of this paper. AdaBoost's cycling behavior lends itself to direct computational methods that are ineffective in the general, non-cycling case of the algorithm. From these computational properties we give a concrete correspondence between AdaBoost's cycling behavior and continued fractions dynamics. Then we explore the results of this correspondence to expound on how the algorithm comes to be in this periodic state at all. What we intend for this work is to be a novel and self-contained explanation for the cycling dynamics of this machine learning algorithm.
Joint Debiased Representation and Image Clustering Learning with Self-Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Contrastive learning is among the most successful methods for visual representation learning, and its performance can be further improved by jointly performing clustering on the learned representations. However, existing methods for joint clustering and contrastive learning do not perform well on long-tailed data distributions, as majority classes overwhelm and distort the loss of minority classes, thus preventing meaningful representations to be learned. Motivated by this, we develop a novel joint clustering and contrastive learning framework by adapting the debiased contrastive loss to avoid under-clustering minority classes of imbalanced datasets. We show that our proposed modified debiased contrastive loss and divergence clustering loss improves the performance across multiple datasets and learning tasks. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SSL-debiased-clustering
Robust Product Classification with Instance-Dependent Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Noisy labels in large E-commerce product data (i.e., product items are placed into incorrect categories) are a critical issue for product categorization task because they are unavoidable, non-trivial to remove and degrade prediction performance significantly. Training a product title classification model which is robust to noisy labels in the data is very important to make product classification applications more practical. In this paper, we study the impact of instance-dependent noise to performance of product title classification by comparing our data denoising algorithm and different noise-resistance training algorithms which were designed to prevent a classifier model from over-fitting to noise. We develop a simple yet effective Deep Neural Network for product title classification to use as a base classifier. Along with recent methods of stimulating instance-dependent noise, we propose a novel noise stimulation algorithm based on product title similarity. Our experiments cover multiple datasets, various noise methods and different training solutions. Results uncover the limit of classification task when noise rate is not negligible and data distribution is highly skewed.
Adversarial Correctness and Privacy for Probabilistic Data Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

We study the security of Probabilistic Data Structures (PDS) for handling Approximate Membership Queries (AMQ); prominent examples of AMQ-PDS are Bloom and Cuckoo filters. AMQ-PDS are increasingly being deployed in environments where adversaries can gain benefit from carefully selecting inputs, for example to increase the false positive rate of an AMQ-PDS. They are also being used in settings where the inputs are sensitive and should remain private in the face of adversaries who can access an AMQ-PDS through an API or who can learn its internal state by compromising the system running the AMQ-PDS. We develop simulation-based security definitions that speak to correctness and privacy of AMQ-PDS. Our definitions are general and apply to a broad range of adversarial settings. We use our definitions to analyse the behaviour of both Bloom filters and insertion-only Cuckoo filters. We show that these AMQ-PDS can be provably protected through replacement or composition of hash functions with keyed pseudorandom functions in their construction. We also examine the practical impact on storage size and computation of providing secure instances of Bloom and insertion-only Cuckoo filters.
M^4I: Multi-modal Models Membership Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

With the development of machine learning techniques, the attention of research has been moved from single-modal learning to multi-modal learning, as real-world data exist in the form of different modalities. However, multi-modal models often carry more information than single-modal models and they are usually applied in sensitive scenarios, such as medical report generation or disease identification. Compared with the existing membership inference against machine learning classifiers, we focus on the problem that the input and output of the multi-modal models are in different modalities, such as image captioning. This work studies the privacy leakage of multi-modal models through the lens of membership inference attack, a process of determining whether a data record involves in the model training process or not. To achieve this, we propose Multi-modal Models Membership Inference (M^4I) with two attack methods to infer the membership status, named metric-based (MB) M^4I and feature-based (FB) M^4I, respectively. More specifically, MB M^4I adopts similarity metrics while attacking to infer target data membership. FB M^4I uses a pre-trained shadow multi-modal feature extractor to achieve the purpose of data inference attack by comparing the similarities from extracted input and output features. Extensive experimental results show that both attack methods can achieve strong performances. Respectively, 72.5% and 94.83% of attack success rates on average can be obtained under unrestricted scenarios. Moreover, we evaluate multiple defense mechanisms against our attacks. The source code of M^4I attacks is publicly available at https://github.com/MultimodalMI/Multimodal-membership-inference.git.
Data Science Approach to predict the winning Fantasy Cricket Team Dream 11 Fantasy Sports
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The evolution of digital technology and the increasing popularity of sports inspired the innovators to take the experience of users with a proclivity towards sports to a whole new different level, by introducing Fantasy Sports Platforms FSPs. The application of Data Science and Analytics is Ubiquitous in the Modern World. Data Science and Analytics open doors to gain a deeper understanding and help in the decision making process. We firmly believed that we could adopt Data Science to predict the winning fantasy cricket team on the FSP, Dream 11. We built a predictive model that predicts the performance of players in a prospective game. We used a combination of Greedy and Knapsack Algorithms to prescribe the combination of 11 players to create a fantasy cricket team that has the most significant statistical odds of finishing as the strongest team thereby giving us a higher chance of winning the pot of bets on the Dream 11 FSP. We used PyCaret Python Library to help us understand and adopt the best Regressor Algorithm for our problem statement to make precise predictions. Further, we used Plotly Python Library to give us visual insights into the team, and players performances by accounting for the statistical, and subjective factors of a prospective game. The interactive plots help us to bolster the recommendations of our predictive model. You either win big, win small, or lose your bet based on the performance of the players selected for your fantasy team in the prospective game, and our model increases the probability of you winning big.
iFlipper: Label Flipping for Individual Fairness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

As machine learning becomes prevalent, mitigating any unfairness present in the training data becomes critical. Among the various notions of fairness, this paper focuses on the well-known individual fairness, which states that similar individuals should be treated similarly. While individual fairness can be improved when training a model (in-processing), we contend that fixing the data before model training (pre-processing) is a more fundamental solution. In particular, we show that label flipping is an effective pre-processing technique for improving individual fairness. Our system iFlipper solves the optimization problem of minimally flipping labels given a limit to the individual fairness violations, where a violation occurs when two similar examples in the training data have different labels. We first prove that the problem is NP-hard. We then propose an approximate linear programming algorithm and provide theoretical guarantees on how close its result is to the optimal solution in terms of the number of label flips. We also propose techniques for making the linear programming solution more optimal without exceeding the violations limit. Experiments on real datasets show that iFlipper significantly outperforms other pre-processing baselines in terms of individual fairness and accuracy on unseen test sets. In addition, iFlipper can be combined with in-processing techniques for even better results.
Accuracy of the Uzbek stop words detection: a case study on "School corpus"
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Stop words are very important for information retrieval and text analysis investigation tasks of natural language processing. Current work presents a method to evaluate the quality of a list of stop words aimed at automatically creating techniques. Although the method proposed in this paper was tested on an automatically-generated list of stop words for the Uzbek language, it can be, with some modifications, applied to similar languages either from the same family or the ones that have an agglutinative nature. Since the Uzbek language belongs to the family of agglutinative languages, it can be explained that the automatic detection of stop words in the language is a more complex process than in inflected languages. Moreover, we integrated our previous work on stop words detection in the example of the "School corpus" by investigating how to automatically analyse the detection of stop words in Uzbek texts. This work is devoted to answering whether there is a good way of evaluating available stop words for Uzbek texts, or whether it is possible to determine what part of the Uzbek sentence contains the majority of the stop words by studying the numerical characteristics of the probability of unique words. The results show acceptable accuracy of the stop words lists.
SecSkyline: Fast Privacy-Preserving Skyline Queries over Encrypted Cloud Databases
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

The well-known benefits of cloud computing have spurred the popularity of database service outsourcing, where one can resort to the cloud to conveniently store and query databases. Coming with such popular trend is the threat to data privacy, as the cloud gains access to the databases and queries which may contain sensitive information, like medical or financial data. A large body of work has been presented for querying encrypted databases, which has been mostly focused on secure keyword search. In this paper, we instead focus on the support for secure skyline query processing over encrypted outsourced databases, where little work has been done. Skyline query is an advanced kind of database query which is important for multi-criteria decision-making systems and applications. We propose SecSkyline, a new system framework building on lightweight cryptography for fast privacy-preserving skyline queries. SecSkyline ambitiously provides strong protection for not only the content confidentiality of the outsourced database, the query, and the result, but also for data patterns that may incur indirect data leakages, such as dominance relationships among data points and search access patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SecSkyline is substantially superior to the state-of-the-art in query latency, with up to 813$\times$ improvement.
One-Shot Transfer of Affordance Regions? AffCorrs!
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we tackle one-shot visual search of object parts. Given a single reference image of an object with annotated affordance regions, we segment semantically corresponding parts within a target scene. We propose AffCorrs, an unsupervised model that combines the properties of pre-trained DINO-ViT's image descriptors and cyclic correspondences. We use AffCorrs to find corresponding affordances both for intra- and inter-class one-shot part segmentation. This task is more difficult than supervised alternatives, but enables future work such as learning affordances via imitation and assisted teleoperation.
ProAPT: Projection of APT Threats with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

The highest level in the Endsley situation awareness model is called projection when the status of elements in the environment in the near future is predicted. In cybersecurity situation awareness, the projection for an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) requires predicting the next step of the APT. The threats are constantly changing and becoming more complex. As supervised and unsupervised learning methods require APT datasets for projecting the next step of APTs, they are unable to identify unknown APT threats. In reinforcement learning methods, the agent interacts with the environment, and so it might project the next step of known and unknown APTs. So far, reinforcement learning has not been used to project the next step for APTs. In reinforcement learning, the agent uses the previous states and actions to approximate the best action of the current state. When the number of states and actions is abundant, the agent employs a neural network which is called deep learning to approximate the best action of each state. In this paper, we present a deep reinforcement learning system to project the next step of APTs. As there exists some relation between attack steps, we employ the Long- Short-Term Memory (LSTM) method to approximate the best action of each state. In our proposed system, based on the current situation, we project the next steps of APT threats.
Face Shape-Guided Deep Feature Alignment for Face Recognition Robust to Face Misalignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

For the past decades, face recognition (FR) has been actively studied in computer vision and pattern recognition society. Recently, due to the advances in deep learning, the FR technology shows high performance for most of the benchmark datasets. However, when the FR algorithm is applied to a real-world scenario, the performance has been known to be still unsatisfactory. This is mainly attributed to the mismatch between training and testing sets. Among such mismatches, face misalignment between training and testing faces is one of the factors that hinder successful FR. To address this limitation, we propose a face shape-guided deep feature alignment framework for FR robust to the face misalignment. Based on a face shape prior (e.g., face keypoints), we train the proposed deep network by introducing alignment processes, i.e., pixel and feature alignments, between well-aligned and misaligned face images. Through the pixel alignment process that decodes the aggregated feature extracted from a face image and face shape prior, we add the auxiliary task to reconstruct the well-aligned face image. Since the aggregated features are linked to the face feature extraction network as a guide via the feature alignment process, we train the robust face feature to the face misalignment. Even if the face shape estimation is required in the training stage, the additional face alignment process, which is usually incorporated in the conventional FR pipeline, is not necessarily needed in the testing phase. Through the comparative experiments, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed method for the face misalignment with the FR datasets.
Conceptual Modeling of the Whole-Part Relationship
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Conceptual models rely on structural information to describe relationships among UML classes; among these, the whole-part (WP) relationship plays a fundamental role. This paper explores and analyzes the WP semantics at large with a focus on its software engineering use. The WP relationship has often been treated as a first-class modeling construct in object-oriented analysis, a subject of keen interest and it is considered important for UML modeling. From the scientific and philosophical aspects, a theory of parts forming a whole is a complex issue, loaded with controversies that are widely discussed. This paper aims to offer a semantic assembly model that is useful to describe WP relationships in conceptual modeling. We contribute to the WP research by conducting an ontological analysis using UML samples that exemplify the WP construct. The method of investigation is based on a model called a thinging machine (TM) to explore the WP semantics through applying TM to numerous existing UML models. The TM model uses the so-called thimacs (things/machines) to form building blocks for describing the domain at a three levels of description: static, events, and behavioral models. This approach contrasts the UML method, which is infected by a multiplicity problem concerning the integrated view of structure and behavior and how to associate diagrams with one another. This investigation s results point to a promising contribution to the understanding of the notion of WP relationship in UML.
Linear Transformations for Cross-lingual Sentiment Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper deals with cross-lingual sentiment analysis in Czech, English and French languages. We perform zero-shot cross-lingual classification using five linear transformations combined with LSTM and CNN based classifiers. We compare the performance of the individual transformations, and in addition, we confront the transformation-based approach with existing state-of-the-art BERT-like models. We show that the pre-trained embeddings from the target domain are crucial to improving the cross-lingual classification results, unlike in the monolingual classification, where the effect is not so distinctive.
Revisiting Crowd Counting: State-of-the-art, Trends, and Future Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Crowd counting is an effective tool for situational awareness in public places. Automated crowd counting using images and videos is an interesting yet challenging problem that has gained significant attention in computer vision. Over the past few years, various deep learning methods have been developed to achieve state-of-the-art performance. The methods evolved over time vary in many aspects such as model architecture, input pipeline, learning paradigm, computational complexity, and accuracy gains etc. In this paper, we present a systematic and comprehensive review of the most significant contributions in the area of crowd counting. Although few surveys exist on the topic, our survey is most up-to date and different in several aspects. First, it provides a more meaningful categorization of the most significant contributions by model architectures, learning methods (i.e., loss functions), and evaluation methods (i.e., evaluation metrics). We chose prominent and distinct works and excluded similar works. We also sort the well-known crowd counting models by their performance over benchmark datasets. We believe that this survey can be a good resource for novice researchers to understand the progressive developments and contributions over time and the current state-of-the-art.
Socially Enhanced Situation Awareness from Microblogs using Artificial Intelligence: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The rise of social media platforms provides an unbounded, infinitely rich source of aggregate knowledge of the world around us, both historic and real-time, from a human perspective. The greatest challenge we face is how to process and understand this raw and unstructured data, go beyond individual observations and see the "big picture"--the domain of Situation Awareness. We provide an extensive survey of Artificial Intelligence research, focusing on microblog social media data with applications to Situation Awareness, that gives the seminal work and state-of-the-art approaches across six thematic areas: Crime, Disasters, Finance, Physical Environment, Politics, and Health and Population. We provide a novel, unified methodological perspective, identify key results and challenges, and present ongoing research directions.